Could Chuck Phillips actually be right about something?

Oh, so that guy Chuck Phillips, the Scotty Templeton of hip-hop journalism, is behind the rumor that Jimmy Henchmen is a snitch, because he's pissed that the LA Times had to pay Jimmy Henchmen a shedload of money, for running a BS story about how Jimmy Henchmen, along with Biggie Smalls and Puff Daddy, had 2Pac set up, that time he shot himself in the nuts.

I should have known that that story was a plant, like the story about Eduardo Saverin feeding chicken to a chicken (apparently animals care about that sort of thing?), and, possibly, the story about Justin Timberlake sniffing coke off the perfectly sculpted bodies of underage interns, in that Facebook movie, which really is the Godfather of our time. Which is not to say that it's definitely not true.

I'm thinking it might be. This time, it's not just Chuck Phillips himself making shit up, using what he learned in that Nick Broomfield movie, along with what Samuel L Jackson likes to call "where there's smoke there's fire logic," and running it in the pages of the LA Times, which couldn't have known any better, because there isn't anyone in their fact checking department who's big on rap music. Plus, even if there was, what sources would they consult? Those ridonkulous mid '90s-era Vibe magazine articles? That Nick Broomfield movie? Random black dudes who claim they know something and can tell you in exchange for a get out of jail free card? The history of this conflict is getting to be like the Bible, in that you can read whatever you want into it and you wouldn't be wrong per se, since it's alll bullshit anyway.

Presumably, whoever took the call from Chuck Phillips talking about how he had this great story about the guy who puts out songs about stop snitching who's really a snitch himself, was aware of the fact that he got dropped from the LA Times like a bad habit, for using it as an outlet for his Biggie and 2Pac fan fiction. If they didn't actually remember him from the time the LA Times had to run a lengthy apology to Jimmy Henchmen, or from the time when he claimed that Biggie Smalls was in Las Vegas the night 2Pac was assassinated (I've written about him here on a number of occasions), I'm sure they would have consulted the Google. I mean, since it's so obvious that the goal here was to throw Jimmy Henchmen under a bus, and since one paper already got itself in trouble behind this shit.

The New York Daily News probably wouldn't have run a story about how Jimmy Henchmen is a snitch, unless they had it on pretty good authority that it's true. The guy is known to be litigious in nature. Exactly what form that evidence took I'm not sure. It sounded like they may have just called down to the courthouse and asked for the transcripts of his trials, then scanned them for the part where it says, "Your honor, since my client has been so useful to you in helping to throw other black people behind bars, we ask that you go very light on his sentencing." You'd think that if there was such a part of a trial, they'd at least have it redacted in any publicly available records - but it's been proven, time and time again, mostly by the Smoking Gun, that you can find all sorts of embarrassing information about people in publicly available records. It goes back to what T.I. was saying when he was explaining why he couldn't possibly be a snitch. If he was, you could easily find where it says that somewhere. The criminal justice system should work on being a bit more discrete about these things. Someone could get their feelings hurt - or worse.

At any rate, I'd say the burden is on Jimmy Henchmen, at this point, to prove that he's not a snitch. However you'd go about doing that. So what that this Chuck Phillips once got caught in a lie, and hence should have no credibility. That always struck me as a technicality. The Times apologized to Jimmy Henchmen not because they knew where he was the night 2Pac shot himself in the nuts, and that he definitely had no idea a jux was in effect, but because the story was based on BS documents that Phillips got from some guy in the joint, who'd been known to come up with BS documents. I thought it was common knowledge that Biggie et al. realized that Pac was cruisin' for a bruisin', and even went so far as to try to warn him, but Pac didn't want to believe fat meat greasy, because he wasn't really a street dude, but rather some guy from ballet school who started pretending to be a street dude after he was in Juice. And the rest, as they say, is history.

To think, I could have explained this to the TIs at the LA Times and saved us all a lot of aggravation.